Archive for May, 2011

On Sunday May 29th, “Project Witness” sponsored a unique symposium entitled “The Untold Story: Religious Faith and Practice during the Holocaust” held at the Museum of Jewish Heritage near Battery Park in lower Manhattan. As a non-profit Holocaust resource center, “Project Witness” merges lucid scholarship with cutting-edge media to provide thought-provoking Holocaust educational tools for schools, community centers, and lay readers. While remaining deeply committed to the exploration of the spiritual, ethical, and intellectual responses of Holocaust survivors and victims, “Project Witness” focuses on the character, identity, and faith of survivors and victims and serves to ensure that their legacy is transformed into an eternal guide toward a more hopeful future.

On January 5, 2011, after months of heated public debate, the Israeli Knesset established a parliamentary committee of inquiry to probe foreign funding of Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the international Israel delegitimization campaign.[1] Was this a draconian, McCarthyist encroachment on the freedom of press as claimed by left-wing groups and politicians, or a legitimate attempt by a besieged democracy to fend off hostile intervention in its internal affairs as argued by the legislation’s proponents?

Last Friday, May 26, 2011, “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” exercised their hard-won right to hold their meetings at New York City’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Center. Their right to hate and to be grossly misinformed was, as usual, presented as a free speech right and as yet another victim-driven Intifada (uprising).

This meeting followed the long campaign to vilify City University Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld for daring to dissent from Tony Kushner’s anti-Israel views; Kushner, who happens to be both gay and Jewish, is nevertheless being given an honorary doctorate this week. These two events are intimately connected to each other and have been further empowered by President Obama’s shameful and dangerous actions towards the Jewish State.

The light is getting brighter and the resolution starker on the “no apprehension policy” being imposed on Border Patrol agents by their superiors: it may be part of an emerging “un-border” policy based on a view that we are currently experiencing “acceptable levels of illegal immigration”, which logically means we can reduce the numbers of Border Patrol on the ground.

September is quickly approaching and the Palestinians are looking forward to being rewarded with state recognition for years of terrorism that has kept them in the news for half a century. In this light, I thought it might be interesting to think of the world in a new way. Instead of legitimate states with representative forms of government, the new paradigm might possibly be a horrifying breakdown of lawful and orderly nations into smaller, lawless territories. The UN will head the initiative to create and recognize these anarchic regions. Instead of being resolved, disputes will be promoted by the UN, now a world agency mandated to play one against another in order to create a sustainable balance of terror. Any group that can assemble the men and arms to produce the necessary violence will find themselves eventually heading up new territories or countries.

Helen Freedman, executive director of Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI), has announced that their upcoming semi-annual “Chizuk” mission to Israel will be dedicated to the memory of their beloved chairman Herbert Zweibon, Z’L who passed away in January of 2011. The tour will run from May 29th through June 7th.

This week, Tom Friedman more than earned his keep at The New York Times by essentially calling for the “non-violent” destruction of the Jewish State. I am not exaggerating. Wait until you read exactly what he’s written in his column: “Lessons From Tahrir Square.”

First, Friedman calls for a “Tahrir Square alternative” in terms of the Israel-”Palestine” impasse.

What surprised me more about President Obama’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than its content was the way the audience fawned all over him and clapped at his every platitude. It was like a meeting of the Soviet Politburo in the 1960′s. He reiterated his views on shrinking Israel (with land swaps but he knows that Israel has no significant amount of land to swap). America, he assured us, will be at Israel’s side during this entire process to hold her hand as she gets used to the inconvenient truth, based in Marxist ideology, that the proletariat (the Palestinians) need more room to expand at the expense of the successful bourgeoisie Israelis. Building a new country not based on Western standards and without asking it to stop its annihilationist charters and Islamist conquest is fine with the Obami. Israel is being asked to turn over the keys to people who have in mind its future destruction.

In recent weeks, we saw how the Muslim world’s obsession with gaining converts evinces, in the words of one Muslim intellectual, an “inferiority complex“–a deadly one at that.

As it happens, inferiority complex is not the only psychological ailment besetting the Muslim world: some Muslims are also projecting the worst traits of Islam onto the beleaguered Christian communities living among them.

In a recent major speech at the State Department, President Obama, addressing the “democratic” revolution in the Middle East and North Africa — predictably Israel became the main point of attention again. Obama, like many of his predecessors (Carter, both Bushs, and Clinton) has made another attempt to resurrect the peace process between Israel and so-called Palestinians.

In September 2008, the U.S. Federal Court in Washington, D.C., rendered a $413 million civil judgment against the government of Syria for its provision of support and material aid to the killers of two American contractors in Iraq.[1] Syria’s appeal is pending, but should it lose, the victims’ families will undoubtedly endeavor to attach Syrian assets in the United States and abroad.

Until now, with the exception of sanctions, financial designations, and periodic cross-border direct action, Washington has imposed little cost on Damascus for its consistent support for terrorist attacks in Iraq since the 2003 war. And while the financial implications of this court verdict are unlikely to change Damascus’s standing support for terrorism, it will impose an unprecedented price on Bashar al-Assad’s increasingly reckless regime.

“Our mood is not one of celebration. Our mood is one of caution and concern. Unease sits heavily on our shoulders”, declared US Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) at the 2011 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC. Expressing concern about the security of Israel he said, “At no time in Israel’s history has her future faced such tension and such serious tests. Uncertainty awaits us on many fronts.”

At the end of a week in which U.S. military forces in Pakistan carried out the execution of Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Taliban declared that the death of “Sheikh Osama bin Laden will give a new impetus to the current jihad against the invaders in this critical phase of jihad,” a stunning display of Islamist insensitivity and arrogance took place at the University of California, Berkeley. On Friday, May 6, 2011, Ebrahim Moosa, a South African Muslim and professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, speaking at a UC Berkeley workshop on “Religious Norms in the Public Sphere,” defended Deobandism, the madrassa-based radical ideology that inspires the Taliban.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was greeted with great enthusiasm and thunderous applause at the concluding banquet of the 2011 AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington last night. “America! We’re with you, this day and every day”, he said, mentioning the tragic death tolls in the aftermath of the tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri.